Simian Design

These are my delicious links for July 13th through July 15th:

• 101 Muppets of Sesame Street – A giant illustration of 101 Muppets. Mouse over them to learn more about some of the lesser-known ones. Done in celebration of their 40th anniversary.
• Ways to trick your brain. –
• light-test.com – When a Photographer wants to test the lighting, often an assistant will step in. These are those shots.
• Digg digs into IE6 usage. – Basically, IE6 users are forced to use IE6 at work. Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.

These are my delicious links for February 26th through February 27th:

• The Design Process Diagram – An excellent diagram from Todd Warfel on the Design Process. So many times clients want to JUMP ahead to the visual comps, this will help you show them how much is needed before that point.
• Tap Boards for my future Kegerator – This is slick. Chalkboard tops for your tap to pour your favorite frosty beverage. I've been wanting a kegerator, and this would sit nicely on top.
• Infragistics Quince: UX Patterns Explorer – The app is basically an organized collection of various interface patterns. Each pattern is part of a ‘problem’, and several examples are usually provided as viable solutions. Each of these problems is also accompanied by a bit of text describing the solutions and providing tips on things like accessibility.

  It uses Silverlight, and the UI is a bit over the top (LOTS of eye candy for eye candies sake.), but good info in there.

These are my delicious links for February 4th through February 5th:

• A Snake of Unusual Size – Neatorama – HOLY CRAP BATMAN! This snake, this monster measured 42 feet long, weighed about 2,500 lbs., and slithered through the rainforests 60 million years ago devouring crocodiles.
• Great retro Helvetica ad from Linotype – This is fantastic.
• Monks in Space (an Aliens3 movie that never was) – There were many iterations of the Alien 3 script. One of the more exotic ones was the Vincent Ward & John Fasano "monks in space" script, illustrated here. Looks fantastic.
• Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites – A great list of ways to address some of the pain points of building and maintaining a modern website.
  List is split this into two sections. The first he calls “below the line,” which are more system level (some things straddle the line) The second section, which he calls “above the line” are common application level components that typically depend on one or more of the components above.

These are my delicious links for January 23rd through January 24th:

• Grow Tower – It's another GROW! These are just simply the best flash games out there, and this one delivers. Fun, fun fun.
• Scriball – Fun flash game where you draw a line that the ball follows. Click for jumping. Easily waste some time here.
• Ranking ALL of the Beatles Songs. – I don't agree with the placement of many of the songs, but I do find the list fantastic. He lists out reasons for each songs placement, and a little history about each song. I myself would have had Good Night and Dear Prudence higher. Same for "I've just seen a face" and "Across the Universe".
• Dummy Text Generator – This is an EXCELLENT Lorem Ipsum generator. Dummy text is text that is used in the publishing industry or by web designers to occupy the space which will later be filled with 'real' content. This is required when, for example, the final text is not yet available. Dummy text is also known as 'fill text'. It is said that song composers of the past used dummy texts as lyrics when writing melodies in order to have a 'ready-made' text to sing with the melody. Dummy texts have been in use by typesetters since the 16th century.
• Hidden Wine Cellar. – Wow, this is an amazing wine cellar. It's a trap-door in your floor that spirals down to a wine cellar. It's simply one of the greatest things I've ever seen.

These are my delicious links for December 23rd:

• Envy Code R preview #7 (scalable coding font) – This isn't a bad looking coding font. Don't know if it's going to be my go-to, but I like the sizing options with this a great deal. Defintely worth checking out. The price is free, as in beer.

These are my delicious links for November 14th:

• Displaying code on your blog – Nice embeddable code using SyntxHighlighter

These are my delicious links for November 13th:

• 12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean – The advantages of clean, semantic HTML are many, yet so many websites suffer from poorly written markup.

  Let’s take a look at some poorly written HTML, discuss its problems, and then whip it into shape!

• Image Resizing – Interestingly (and not surprisingly), browsers differ in rendering images at non-native sizes, with some providing noticeably better results than others. Internet Explorer 6 in particular looked to be the least smooth when scaling images down, but some interesting workarounds are available.

These are my delicious links for November 12th:

• 50+ Gorgeous Navigation Menus – Vandelay Website Design has a good collection of inspirational menu ideas. A pretty standard list as far as these lists go, but still worthwhile to have for possible inspiration.
• Ten Web Development Tips I Wish I'd Known Two Years Ago – A very nice list of tips. I particularly endorse both the charging for IE 6 support, and the learning of a JavaScript API (jQuery, mootools, etc)

These are my delicious links for September 29th:

• 60+ Free Textures from SXC.hu –
• Microsoft and jQuery – Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).

The 10 best CSS hacks is a great list. Defintely worth checking out.

1. Vertical align div
2. Min-height
3. PNG Transparency
4. Autoclear
5. Reset CSS (incredibly important)
6. Scrolling Render IE
7. Opacity
8. PRE Tag
9. LI Background Repeat IE
10. Targeting Browsers

Good stuff.